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Saturday, June 2, 2018

It's The Final Countdown

Well technically it's the second countdown, but more on that later...

One year ago today I purchased a 3rd/4th season countdown from Billy Gunter of Knight Designs. Billy's countdowns are machined out of aluminum, with a custom printed circuit board (PCB) and electronics. If you are not familiar with what a countdown is, it was the POWER, FUEL ON, MIN RPM, IGNITORS indicators that would light up and "count down" anytime KITT was started up. You can see this in the clip below.

My countdown arrived on June 22, 2017, and I could not wait to get the package opened!

Billy always packs everything securely.

When laying out the individual pieces, I immediately noticed something was amiss. The PCB attaches to the aluminum countdown just as it is pictured below. This would mean that the very first indicator would be red, with the second, third, and fourth being yellow. As you can see from the clip above, it should be yellow, yellow, yellow, red. Billy no longer makes these countdowns and was selling off the last of his stock. I think this might have been a prototype board.

I contacted Billy and he told me to send the PCB back to him and he would fix it. He contacted me after he received it and told me he was going to make a completely new board.

Here is the completely new board with the correct LED color sequence.

This is what my countdown will look like once it is assembled and painted black.